Consensus-based resource allocation among objects in the internet of things

Abstract

The pervasive use of smart objects is encouraging the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) vision, where even the most common and simple object is expected to acquire information from the surrounding ambient and to cooperate with other objects to achieve a common goal . In such a heterogeneous and complex scenario, optimal allocation of resources to application tasks (e.g., available energy, computing speed, storage capacity) is paramount to fairly distribute them and not overload some objects. In this paper, we focus on finding the optimal assignment to the physical devices that can perform the same task needed by the running applications. To this, we rely on the technologies that have been already developed around the notion of Virtual Object (VO), which is the digital counterpart of the physical object and is used to augment its functionalities with the use of virtualization technologies. Our contribution is twofold. Firstly, we extend the current functionalities of VOs to make them capable of implementing a distributed strategy for the allocation of tasks among objects: the information model is enhanced to include the Quality of Information (QoI) notion and the possible different architectural solutions are presented. Secondly, we propose a distributed algorithm where VOs negotiate to reach a consensus on resources allocation, in order to distribute the workload among the objects that can cooperate to the same task and to ensure that the QoI requirements are fulfilled. Simulation results show that, compared to a static frequency allocation, the algorithm enhances the performance of the system with an average improvement of 27% in network lifetime and confirms the compliance to QoI requirements.